Shifting consumer preferences and an increasing priority on convenience will fuel radical changes to shopping in the coming years. Read to discover what our robot, Athena, thinks the future of shopping could be, act accordingly or click any link to read the evidence gleaned from 1,362 reports, articles and PowerPoints from the web and social media in a few seconds.

What is changing?

Summary

Change Drivers

In 2017, online shopping sales in the United States alone reached $2.3 trillion, and the global growth of online retail sales is projected to hit US$4.48 trillion by 2021.

Unmanned stores may become a more common sight around the world in years to come but people will still feature heavily in creating a successful shopping experience.

By 2020, China's new system of social credit scoring is expected to give each citizen a trustworthiness rating based on anything from shopping habits to choice of friends.

Only about 20 percent of users have tried voice shopping with an AI assistant today, but that's going to change, with voice shopping expected to be a $40 billion industry by 2022.

By 2027, technology will dramatically reshape the retail industry in China-most notably, as the IoT and AI digitalize real-world actions (widgets to digits), autonomous vehicles and drones improve logistics, and augmented reality transforms the shopping experience.

A new report from Food Marketing Institute and Nielsen finds that 70% of consumers will be grocery shopping online by 2024.

Analysis

This summary analysis draws from our robot's below visualizations of the future of shopping.

Systems map: The shopping experience is going to be dramatically influenced by arriving technologies such as chatbots, drones, store robots, cashless payments, AI and virtual reality led by Amazon, Facebook, Google and Walmart.

Radar chart: Over the next five years, VR / AR apps will transform numerous industries from e-commerce to social media to publishing to manufacturing design, increasing productivity and creating new ways of working, playing, and shopping.

Graph-It: Voice and AI will bring a massive shift in instore and ecommerce shopping habits with security and privacy at the forefront of sellers and buyers minds in 2021. Zero trust is on the rise.

Spline chart (Beta): Peak spline activity in terms of changes to shopping are expected between 2020 and 2029 with increasing digitization due to drone deliveries, automatic ordering and mobile phone shopping expected to change shopping habits from 2025 onwards, especially with the arrival of 5G from late this year.

Emerging Drivers:The very high, intensity of improvements being made to the shopping experience is expected to continue for at least a decade. Traditional retailers are also fighting back through stores designed with entertainment and social experiences in mind.

Sentiment: Sentiment towards these improvements are very positive but concerns are rising about the likely large loss of jobs, shops and retail support services with the further hollowing out of town centers.

Pie Charts: The Pie Charts reflect the massive upheaval in shopping that will occur between now and 2040 when customers are likely to have embraced the new business models as the status quo. The prizes can be counted in billions pf dollars for the winners who are fast gaining traction with their new models and evolving rapidly.

Heat map: The Heat Map indicates that the UK, USA and China will be the likely leaders in improving the shopping experiencewith Amazon's arrival in Australia likely to shake things up there.

Geography:Geographically, it's the major affluent shopping areas of the world that will see the most change in habits first: USA and Canada with India's expected growth and burgeoning population another major target and Europe, Australia and UAE next.

SWOT: Lastly, the SWOT chart shows a higher level of threat and weaknesses for the reasons mentioned earlier but still with huge global improvement opportunities and existing strengths. Are you ready to inspire engage and enable all your stakeholders with a better business model for mid-21st century? Will you be an Adventurer, Adopter or, Abstainer? We sincerely hope you will be an Adventurer and improve life for everyone and those to follow us.

Potential Solutions (New)

Open Banking will unite banks and FinTech in creating a new world.

AI for CRM will soon become a global economic engine for innovation, business models and jobs.

The winners in this new digital world will challenge conventional thinking on product innovation, customer engagement, organizational structure, strategy and business models.

Potential Responses (New)
Determine how you can respond to Athena's findings by examining your options either on your own, or collaboratively if our client.

Visuals
For more detailed explanation of the graphics below please click here. All outlooks based on 2025 unless otherwise stated.

System map
The shopping experience is going to be dramatically influenced by arriving technologies such as chatbots, drones, store robots, cashless payments, AI and virtual reality led by Amazon, Facebook, Google and Walmart.

Radar
Over the next five years, VR / AR apps will transform numerous industries from e-commerce to social media to publishing to manufacturing design, increasing productivity and creating new ways of working, playing, and shopping.

Graph-It
Voice and AI will bring a massive shift in instore and ecommerce shopping habits with security and privacy at the forefront of sellers and buyers minds in 2021. Zero trust is on the rise.

Spline (Beta)
Peak spline activity in terms of changes to shopping are expected between 2020 and 2029 with increasing digitization due to drone deliveries, automatic ordering and mobile phone shopping expected to change shopping habits from 2025 onwards, especially with the arrival of 5G from late this year.

The blue line represents the five-year moving average of the aggregated splines that can be seen in background.

Emerging Drivers
The very high, intensity of improvements being made to the shopping experience is expected to continue for at least a decade. Traditional retailers are also fighting back through stores designed with entertainment and social experiences in mind.

Sentiment
Sentiment towards these improvements are very positive but concerns are rising about the likely large loss of jobs, shops and retail support services with the further hollowing out of town centers

Pie Charts
The Pie Charts reflect the massive upheaval in shopping that will occur between now and 2040 when customers are likely to have embraced the new business models as the status quo. The prizes can be counted in billions pf dollars for the winners who are fast gaining traction with their new models and evolving rapidly.

Heat map
The Heat Map indicates that the UK, USA and China will be the likely leaders in improving the shopping experiencewith Amazon's arrival in Australia likely to shake things up there.

Geography
Geographically, it's the major affluent shopping areas of the world that will see the most change in habits first: USA and Canada with India's expected growth and burgeoning population another major target and Europe, Australia and UAE next.

SWOT
Lastly, the SWOT chart shows predominant opportunities and strengths in shopping with few major threats or risks likely to seriously know the inexorable changes that are forecast to happen in the next twenty years.

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A few Potential Solutions (automatically selected by Athena from our database)

The Philippines' richest man Henry Sy will start rolling out robots next year to help customers navigate his massive shopping malls.

The new visual search capability could help Pinterest evolve into an online shopping experience with the ability to tap into users at all moments in the purchasing process.

The greatest opportunity for growth will come from product categories that were traditionally dominated by brick-and-mortar shopping, including groceries, major appliance products and clothing.

UK women will spend almost half of their remaining life with low dependency needs, such as help with activities like washing and shopping, alongside a small increase in years requiring intensive 24-hour care.

An influx of capital could result in a revival in the formal retail sector (e.g., supermarkets, shopping malls) over the next several years.

Extracted forecasts found by Athena and linked back to the original articles, reports and PowerPoints (Insights) that she found can be found below using this search term:

Custom Services
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Sources
Athena used the sources below as the top ones to create this report and determined which embedded forecasts are included in this Trend Alert. She found 1,362 forecasts in seconds on 17th January 2018 to allow us to publish this report in less than two hours. She can turn these into PowerPoint slides and Audio files in minutes too as you wish, or we can prepare a full customized and professionally written brief for you to order covering all these forecasts.

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Athena
Athena does show duplicates to aid your understanding of themes as well as contradictory forecasts. She may also show near-duplicates. You can speed read past the duplicates and near-duplicates if you wish, though the latter may show additional information. You can use the contradictory, and likely uncertain forecasts she finds to imagine different scenarios. The future is unpredictable, but we can examine the possibilities and choose our preferable future from the choices she presents.

Athena is apolitical. She will report forecasts from different viewpoints however distasteful that might be to our own values. Wearing rose-colored glasses is not her purpose; reporting potential futures is. So, we recommend you check her veracity before responding to her extracted forecasts.

Just like humans, Athena can be fallible. Do recognize that you and your associates are biased too. But whereas you tire, make mistakes and only recognize what interests you, she does not. She might miss or misinterpret as you do, but with far less frequency and she'll take uncomfortable truths and alternative ideas in her stride. But, please let us know if you feel her bias can be reduced. We want to do our best for you. And, as with any research, you should check and triangulate her findings for yourself.

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